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We philosophers have always been interested in what is unique about human beings – how it is that humans engage with and make sense of the world around us. What, if anything, gives meaning to our lives?

Philosophers are very interested in thinking, well, how can that happen? How is it that these minds up here, somewhere in us, manage to get out there into the world and grab a hold of these physical objects.

I’m Ryan Cross and I’m a bass player, cellist, composer… I started playing when I was 9 years old. I started playing cello and started playing after my brothers. They all played classical instruments and so I decided to go on and follow in their footsteps. But then I took it a step farther after high school and was picking up the bass; and started to figure out that the bass was a lot cooler than the cello.

For me, connecting to my instrument, being connected to myself. I have to be connected HERE. So I have to be in touch with myself. Myself, meaning the instrument becomes you, you know, so you’re in touch with THIS.

So, if you go all the way back to Ancient Greece to the 5th Century BC in Athens, you find one of the most important philosophers in the history of the West, namely Plato. And Plato was famous for articulating a story about what it is for anything to be anything at all, and, in particular, what it is for us to be the kinds of beings that we are.

One of his big contributions to philosophy was the theory of forms, and that was the idea that we understand things and recognize things and can use things only to the extent that we have an idea of what they are.

On the Platonic model, the most important and most interesting thing that we can do as human beings is to sit back and think rationally about the nature of the universe. That’s a classical philosophers account of what’s special about us as human beings. We’re rational beings. We are intellectual beings. We are thinking beings.

And what you get is this incredible idea, of what I call disengaged subjects, but the subject of knowledge is not engaged in a society, on the contrary. Descartes is asking people, each one to go back into their own mind and see how they can be certain of anything in the world right? So disengaged from the society, as it were from fellow speakers, disengaged from the body, disengaged from tradition and history, don't simply take anything on the fact that you got it from your preceptors or...work it out for yourself. It is an incredible act of total disengagement the reallyproperhumanmind,knowingthingsisutterlyoutside ofthesociety,thebodyandanykindoftraditionright?

01:06:35:06-01:06:49:17

HUBERT DREYFUS VO

Descartes was obsessed with the idea that we couldn’t get off the ground if we couldn’t find something certain to reason from. And naturally the only thing he could be certain of, is that he was a thinking thing. Because he said that even if he doubted it – that he was a thinking thing – he was thinking.

So there you can get started. And from there you can deduce everything. And every philospher afterwards – big deal philosophers like

Kant, was working within that framework and Spinoza, Leibnitz and so forth. They all just took that for granted, and then a philospher came along--high powered enough to resist and overthrow the whole Plato-Descartes tradition.

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher. In 1927 he published a book called Being in Time which was a landmark in 20th century philosophy– one the most influencial works in philosophy in the last hundred years and maybe ever.

Heidegger’s idea was that the Platonic model has got the story completely backwards. That in fact, the most important thing that characterizes us isn’t our ability to sit back and think rationally and logically about any entity or any set of situations in the world...the most important thing about us is our ability to become INVOLVED in worlds and to develop skills for acting in those worlds that at root are not intellectual skills but very practical kinds of skills

Skillful coping is being ale to do things with your hands like painting, or handwriting, or woodworking….. Oh sports is another swell example..that you learn how to do but when you are asked how you do it you can’t actually say, "Well I just well you know I’m trying to hit the ball…how am I trying to hit the ball? I don’t know..I’m JUST swinging the bat," but you’re not JUST swinging the bat - you may be talking to someone who’s really good at it!

So Heidegger is really confronting the entire tradition of western philosophy going back to the ancient Greeks and from the earliest times, philosophy was….uh, well, let me start over again that was terrible.

If you think about a hammer in a philosophical way or what people would call a commonsensical way, you’d look at the properties the hammer has…the shape it has, the color it has. And Heidegger said that’s wrong – if you want to see what a hammer is, you don’t think about the properties,

You don’t describe it, you don’t explain it, you pick it up and you start driving nails. And you really only see what he hammer is when you have the skills to hammer well. Without those, the hammer will never really show itself to you.

You're ability and your skill for hammering with a hammer, although when you acquire it, it might require a little bit of thought so that you don't bang your thumb every once in while and that kind of thing.

When you've got the skill as a real skilled carpenter, the LAST thing that you want is to be thinking about or rationally analyzing or stepping back from the activity you are involved in.

You wanna allow the activity to go through your body cos your body has a certain kind of knowhow for operating in this domain that...that thought about the domain will typically get in the way of. This most fundamental way of interacting with out world, other people in our world...other objects, other tools in our world and so on...had been completely neglected for 2500 years of western history because of the influence of Plato.

I went in this woman's restaurant, she taught me everything I know. One thing I learned, to love that restaurant, I learned to love food, I learned to appreciate it and I always said this is what I want to do.

She has 60 plus years of experienced cooking. People think of recipes, she is the recipe you know...when we are back there cooking, we never looking in cook books, its just out the head. What we wanna cook today? We wanna cook tomato and basil soup and I think we wanna add some popcorn in the middle and then you'll get the butter flavor of the popcorn. It's just amazing the different dishes we come up with or she comes up with just off the cuff.

The great thing about being a philosopher is that it is very hard to test what we say. You can say anything you want and we are usually dealing in such abstract, general things that you never have to prove it. The theories of the mind have been put to the test with the development of the computer.

Using computers we were finally in a position to test thousands of years of philosophical theory about how the mind works.

01:13:57:08-01:14:10:01

To a lot of people it seemed like the computer finally offered us a chance to construct a mind, using as our model all these philosophical theories we had developed. Bert Dreyfus' genius was recognizing that this was what was going on.

What programmers were doing was trying to make a computer intelligent by giving it the kind of thoughts that they thought humans had. So you'd make an exhaustive list, there is a table in the room, the table is brown the table is hard, the table is this size and you can see this could go on for a very, very long time.

And its got to do a lot with understanding what's relevant. What's relevant right now is that I am sitting here talking to you. The lights are relevant, the cameras are relevant. If there is any dust on the floor or under this chair it is not, you just can't take account for all the facts in this room, there are an infinite number of facts in this room.

The systems would get hung on metaphors or hung up on inferences that were dependent on knowledge of ordinary things in everyday life, like if you pick up this piece of weed here and drop it will fall right? And when it will fall it won't make a sound because it is soft. Things like this that everybody knows. How much stuff like that do you know? A hundred things? A thousand things? Maybe a million things? Right...

And I think the hope was that once we got a enough of those facts into a computer then the computer would start acting like we do. If Heidegger was right and Bert Dreyfus was right you couldn't do that.

They had the Platonic idea that the kinds of beings that we are are rational computing mechanisms. We are logical characterizers of the universe and they thought that they could therefore replicate all of the things we do just by writing computer programs, which after all are very logical and very rational and follow rules very very well.

And moreover, sort of laughing, at the philosophy classes where they say "look you philosophers have been trying to understand perception and action and skill and all that for 2000 years and all you have gotten no where. We already have a very important clue and in another 8-10 years we'll have intelligent computers".

Once, I was really brave. They said "we've got a car that will drive on the street in traffic from here to there with no human driver". And I said "I doubt it" and they said "we're telling you, we've got it" and I said "I'm telling you you haven't got it, you're lying!" And I was right...I mean it was just that reality was on my side.

There this huge effort to suppress this criticism, mainly because there were millions of dollars at stake. DARPA gave them money for defense research, and they were afraid they would stop giving them money. And then when I was at MIT they were even more afraid because the AI lab got about a million dollars a year from DARPA for AI research. And they were afraid that if they ever read my paper they would take away their money. And in the end that is sort of what happened.

The claim was that you could build such and such machine and you could test that claim by seeing whether you could build such and such a machine. And it couldn't be done in the 1950's or the 60's and it hasn't been done even now.

Perhaps I can reach to one of the most fundamental aspects about the difference between human beings and machines by adverting to something about each of us with which we are all deeply familiar with. And that is that, it matters to us what happens to us in the world. It matters to us what happens to us, it mattes to us what happens to our friends, it matters to us the progress of science and philosophy. All of those are desiderata, those are things to build a life on that one can summarize in the phrase, 'giving a damn'. And if you have that phrase then you can say in a word, what AI has so far failed to come up with by saying the trouble with computers is they don't give a damn.

'Get this straight/I was never perfect/I'm not now/And I never will be'

01:20:55:14-01:22:27:10

Flamenco is a culture... of communication between people, not on stage.

Flamenco art is the most powerful drug. If you get hooked into it, there is no medicine to get you off it.

Flamenco is not classical music, Flamenco is of the street.

It's not mechanical. Flamenco is laughter and tears at the same time.

It's a way of feeling, of explaining what's happening to you. Mediated by music.

On the way to Sacromonte/I met some black eyes/that the greatest painter would pay money just to see

( Manuel Molina is one of Spain's most beloved flamenco musicians. In the 1970's he and his wife formed the successful Lole y Manuel, & they recorded 7 best selling albums. They filled stadiums with performances and their music has been featured in films like Kill Bill Vol. 2)

I sing to life and to the birds and to nature and to love and to caresses and to kisses.

If you asked me for the moon/I couldn't give it to you/ because the moon is imprisoned/in the Alhambra of Granada/ She's there as a slave/ of the Sultan's kisses

The guitar, like any instrument, is a dialogue between the guitar player and the guitar.

01:22:28:17-01:22:48:21

CHARLES TAYLOR VO

The really important ends of human life are ends that are only perceptible if you let yourself be within the human situation totally. I mean, take love, what is it to have a really loving relationship? What is it to have a real communion? What is it to have a really meaningful bit of music, you can go on and on.

01:22:52:15-01:23:40:16

Nobody could lose touch with that aspect of being human entirely but they always denature it. Of course people were moved by music, people were moved by art, people were moved by love etc. so they invented various ways of describing that. I mean some kind of animal type sympathy bonds people, so that can explain why love is important. And then they explain that certain type of emotions we find pleasurable are awoken in us by listenting to certain types of music. Then you get incidentally an interesting shift where people talk about the validity of art in terms of this notion of aesthetics, and in other words, in terms of our reaction. Anthesis is our sensation, in terms of the profound truth that you can find in a great work of art, you can find the truth about human beings.

IV. MOODS

IV. ESTADOS DE ÁNIMO

01:23:49:11-01:24:12:18

MARK WRATHALL VO

Moods don't happen without our heads, but that doesn't mean they happen in our heads. The analogy I like to use is a radio...right, a radio gets tuned into different radio stations, as you turn the dial you get different songs playing on the radio. That doesn't mean the stations are all inside the radio, it just means that without the radio getting tuned to them you are not in a position to pick them up.

The traditional philosophical way of understanding the world and thinking of kind of inside subjective stuff, thoughts inside of us and then facts, objects out in the world. One thing that that way of thinking about the world does, is it makes all sorts of things inside of us, moods, emotions. Right those are kind of subjective things that we project out on the world, onto things. So you wanna say, the world's not happy or sad, we're happy and sad and we project our happiness out onto the world.

When this phenomenological tradition started to undercut the distinction between subjects and objects, what that did was allow us to, in a much more natural way, make room for moods, emotions to be out in the world.

When you talk of something like a joyful mood in the room, its plainly not a creation in my mind or your mind. What it is if you like is a creation of our interaction.

01:25:18:11-01:25:36:00

MANUEL MOLINA (IN SPANISH)

Do you remember that afternoon in Triana?/ I gave you a kiss and suddenly Seville was illuminated/

01:25:40:19-01:26:29:13

MARK WRATHALL VO

I think this matches our common sense way of talking about it. So we talk about the mood in the room.There was a happy mood as we walked into the party; or the mood of the nation is downcast right now or depressed as a nation. Now I think that is capturing something real about our experience of the world and the way the world isn't just these sort of neutral facts. But that it lines up in particular ways, it's illuminated in particular ways and when we get in the right mood it is a way of getting in tune with the world so that it can show certain features to us. So when you are happy the world looks different, and it is not just that you're interpreting the world through a different filter, but its that your happiness tunes you into features of the world that you weren't paying attention to.

Just as skills allow things to show themselves, they also allow people to show them and be the people that they are.The craftsperson as they learn how to work with wood, how to hammer, how to use the equipment, they start to see things that someone without those skills doesn't see. They become someone who inhabits a world differently.

Rules work by ignoring details. Anyone who's very skilled in a domain knows that being very skilled means responding not just in general terms to the situation but responding very specifically to what the situation demands. So a chef working in a kitchen can't go by the rules of a cookbook.

Let me tell you about rules and cooking. You know, I had a book written by a woman, and she put the recipes in the book that her housekeeper or at that time was the nanny of the house, you know, but she was the lady who ran the house. So naturally all her friends, when the lady wrote the cookbook somewhere bout' 1910 or so, they asked her "why do you giver her all your recipes and all your things?"

So her answer was a good one, she said "you know, cooking is like religion. Rules don't no more make a cook than sermons make a saint".

Risk is absolutely important in becoming a master, in fact in acquiring any skills at all, because you have to leave the rules behind and stop doing what one generally does and doing the standard thing and you push out into your own experience of the world.

01:30:08:10-01:30:17:09

MARK WRATHALL VO

You have to take risks, you have to do something that the rules don't tell you to do so that to you can start to learn to get tuned into the particular features of the situation.

01:30:24:13-01:30:26:13

TAO VO

What are the most important things to master?

01:30:26:21-01:30:36:10

BOB TEAGUEVO

Learning to read ocean conditions, knowing your boat, practice, experience and I guess there is an element of luck and then probably have some balls too.

01:30:37:00-01:30:46:21

TONY SCARLATA VO

Just the human element, I mean controling these boats when they take off, they won't do this, they'll climb this way like a plane and the next thing you know you are going swimming.

01:30:47:08-01:31:14:00

HUBERT DREYFUS VO

The question that arises, whether the people that are running speed boat races are bringing out something important about the boat or about the water that they are sensitive to and nobody has been responsive to before or, whether the water and the boats are just means to achieve some particular goal, like being the fastest boat. It may be that some of them are doing one and some of them are doing another and some of them are doing both.

01:31:16:19-01:31:29:18

MARK WRATHALL VO

So the willingness to take risks is a very important stage in moving beyond just competence in following rules and doing what everyone else does, to getting to the position where you learn what your supposed to be responding to.

01:31:37:17-01:32:01:17

HUBERT DREYFUSVO

What distinguishes the kind of risks we're interested in from just bravado, is whether the risks are taken in the interest of what somebody is committed to. What they've defined themselves in terms of, and what makes the meaningful differences in their lives. That kind of risk is a special kind of risk that is a necessary part of becoming a master in anything.

01:32:01:23-01:32:21:03

TAYLOR CARMAN VO

Heidegger calls this, fairly dramatically, running forward into death. And what that means I think is being willing to embrace a particular kind of possibility and let other possibilities die off. Risks of looking ridiculous, for example, risks of genuinely losing things you might regret losing later on.

01:32:24:05-01:32:34:06

JUMANEE SMITH - JAZZ TRUMPETER

Taking risks is important, it is an essential part of Jazz. Improvisation is supposed to be an element of freedom, venturing into space that hasn't been seen before.

You are supposed to be always trying something new, instead of playing patterns or playing something everyone has heard before. Sometimes I would surprise myself, sometimes I listen back to something I've played and be like 'Ah man, did I play that?' in a good way you know. And then other times I'm like 'oh man, did I play that?'

In addition to the fact that you can't ever get beyond a rule governed behavior without taking risks, there is also a kind of exhilaration or joy in human existence, leaving the rules behind, going out on the edge, letting the world show something new to them. The risk takers are the ones who disclose new worlds, disclose new ways to be human, new ways to behave and discover new things about the world.

What happens when you have this commitment to a particular something that's finite and that you could lose and that's risky. And you hold yourself open to it completely, what happens in that situation is that you get a sort of meaningful existence and the meaningful existence is the one that identifies who you are, it is your meaningful existence. It is the one that picks you out as an individual because nobody else understands the particular hierarchy of meaningful differences the way you do.

The issue is what is it to be the kind of being that we are, and you want to explore that issue by asking what is it to be the best version of us. When we're operating at our best, we're precisely not detached from the situation we're involved in. Rather, we've opened ourselves up to being called to act in a certain way in a situation. So you find examples of this all over the place. I read recently a book by Jon McPhee called A Sense of Where You Are which is a book about Bill Bradley who was an extraordinary college basketball player and went on to be a great basketball player in the NBA. He says the most amazing thing about Bradley when he's taking the ball down the court is his vision. He says he doesn't seem to be looking at anything. Rather, he's a glaze of panoptic attention. He's not focused on anything but hes ready to be drawn into whatever it is that's calling him to act at the moment.

Authenticity means owning up to the situation you are in, confronting the situation and doing just what needs to be done. Its a responsiveness to the unique particular situation you are in. When you are authentic you're resolute, you are confronting the situation you are in as this particular situation not just as an example of a kind of situation.

I call it the 'teenage boy phenomenon', when boys often are trying to figure how they ought to act and what it is cool to do and what it is uncool to do in particular situations, you often find some of them who do what they're sure one ought to do in a particular situation and they do it because they're sure they ought to do it. And it's always a disaster.

When kids are coming up and they are learning to play in schools and they are in that formal environment where they are in front of a teacher playing music, they are forced to bring something to the table and told to get better and better. You know 'you're not playing well, you need to play better today'. What's lacking is listening to everyone else in the room and sort of understanding that I don't have to rely on just everything I know if I listen to the other guys at the moment I can come up with new things on the spot.

That is when I'm like really in tune with it or in touch or channeling if you want to say.

So the authentic person is the one who will confront this concrete situation, who will do what needs to be done, is responsive to it, tune to it and who therefore has a certain kind of spontaneity that you don't get if you insist on falling back on rules, principals, procedures, generic formulas for how to act and what to think and what to say and how to be.

When I was only playing classical I would just read what was just on the page, learn it and memorize it and play it. With jazz, when I'm in that zone, I'm not even thinking about what am I playing or what note, its just what is going on in the moment with the other musicians and this is what I'm bringing out, it's really hard to describe.

It is a very common quality for people that are learning how to play jazz to be very introverted with their music. Practicing every day is something that you do by yourself, you open up your practice book and you read your notes or whatever, you practice your rudiments on your drums, these are things that you are doing all by yourself. And so when you get to a performance centre and you are around other musicians there is a huge tendency to sort of get in your head and go back to what you're used to do doing every day, 6 hours a day is just playing by yourself and not really listening for the ways to react to what it going on outwards. And as you grow older and as you get more experience and as you learn to master your instrument, master music making you learn to include the other musicians and then even further include the audience and also include the nuances and the different sort of aspects around the room and bring that in and use that to help you create the music that you are creating for because you are always creating music for somebody.

Actors actually have this wonderful expression, very Heidegerrian, though I don't think they know it. Which is that when you are on stage and you are acting you have to, as they say, you have to own it. That's a beautiful way of describing, you know, going for it and really putting yourself into it and not wanting to step back and distance yourself from what you are up to. It is very tempting to want to sort of keep the back door open so that you can step out of your actions and disembowel them and rethink them or play the scene all over again and so on...But If you are on stage and acting, you can tell when an actor is reticent in that way.

In these kind of situations, they experience themselves as having the action drawn out of them and you'll find it in sporting events and I'm sure that you'll find it in music, you'll find it in any domain where operating in the domain requires a sophisticated kind of skill and requires a kind of openness to what is going on in the moment, and that goes also for the domain of living a life.

There is what Heidegger calls "The One", which is his name for the social norms. That is you do what "one" does: You drive on the right hand side of the street. You wear clothes. You stand the distance that one is supposed to stand in your culture when you talk to people, and so forth.

There is a sense that mindless conformism is dehumanizing and destroys what's great about us and unique about us. So, we value individuality as well. But you know there is a tension there, if everybody is an individual then you lose the benefits that come from shared adherence to rules and shared norms and values. So, there's always a tension going on there.

So, if you did something that was really totally radically new and had no continuity with the traditions of the culture your in, it would be unintelligible. And it wouldn't just be unintelligible to your friends. It would be unintelligible to you.

There's a certain romantic conception which is that you just burst out of all convetional constraints all norms and received opinions and you just become you own person, we are thoroughly conditioned by the world we are in and that world is a world of customs, traditions, practices that we're just so immersed in we can never see our way out of it. So, the only way to do anything skillfully and with innovation and insight and sensitivity and authentically is to be appropriating traditions, practices, customs that are all around us in the world. That we've just absorbed.

When the South American teams about two years ago realized that they could gain some space over the Germans by pulling the ball back to right on to the sideline. They'd pull it back to the sideline and the Germans were afraid. The Germans really respect the rules and the boundaries. They wouldn't come in so it gave them a little room. Alright, so they used this superior skill that they had to really manipulate the lines; it gave them the space and they started beating the German teams again.

The example of an athlete I think is a good illustration of this. Athletes are rule bound. Rule governed. You can't play the game unless you are following the rules, but the great athletes see a way to express something about the game within the confines of the rules, but in a way that other people haven't thought to do or aren't able to do.

There is the famous example. The Fosbury flop. He jumps with his back to the thing he's jumping over. Everybody else sort of dived over and everybody thought it was crazy, but he won gold medals at the olympics.

Heidegger had to work out a new notion of the world because it was clear that it's not the ideas in another realm that Plato was thinking about and it's not the sum total of objects which is what Descartes was thinking about. Well then what is it? What is it to be open to the world the way we are? What is it we are open to when we are open to the world? What is it to have a world at all? There are lots of worlds: the world of jazz, the world of carpentry, the world of cooking, the sports world and there is our world, ours meaning the academic world.

Heidegger thought that our highest dignity as human beings--what really set us apart from everything else in the universe--was our capacity to "disclose" whole new worlds, to open up whole new possibilities.

01:46:26:07-01:47:03:09

Heidegger coined this idea of disclosure, to capture something that we are not used to thinking about, and that is the way that things only show themselves when all the conditions of skill and all the relationships between them are possible and then the experience there is of something opening up a space of possibilities, opening up a way of inhabiting the world opening up. And its not like it was there all along, its not like the world of jazz music was somewhere there in the middle ages say or in the Greek world just waiting to be discovered. It was something that had to have a space provided for it.

01:47:26:23-01:47:40:02

These worlds, these coherent whole organized ways of being humans in activities at objects in the world, all of that requires something to open up.

Heidegger, especially in the last few decades of his life, became obsessed with what he called the 'hidden history of the West'. It wasn't the sort of history historians usually talk about, things happening, battles been fought. Instead it was the history of changes in worlds.

Everything is. We don't usually think about what isness means but in his view the history of being is a series of three to five fundamentally different ways of conceiving isness. And its not like people walk around thinking isness is this or its that, its just they are socialized into it. They grow up learning to deal with things through practices in different ways.

Then what happened after that, the current understanding of being in Greek was 'poeisis' and poeisis means bringing things out. But this is like growing crops, this is nurturing. It was what craftsmen do, so like Hiroshi they were helping the grain in the wood come out and show itself at its best and of course cooks do the same thing. They bring out what is best in the food and they bring out what's best in the people eating the food and they bring them all together. Something of poeisis is still left from that epoch and its kind of marginal for us now. The big banquets were the central thing for the Homeric Greeks and the craftsman were the central thing for the poeisis epoch but we still have a sense of that just as we have still have a sense of things whooshing up, moods particularily.

The next one is very interestingly different from poeisis, instead of bringing out what is in things, the Roman understanding of being was to impose form on matter and instead of bringing things out you hammered it into shape, you imposed an order on everything. Their favorite thing, I would imagine, would be bricks. You just get this mud, you can't bring out the form in the mud by poeisis, you just make the mud into bricks, you make the bricks into roads, you make the roads in bridges and you administer the whole Roman empire. You kept down the crowd as Virgil says the great person does.

Then that sets up the Christian one, and finally there is only one big producer, God. He imposes all the forms on everything, everything has its proper place in a hierarchy and everybody knows what to do because they got that place. The king does what kings do and the bishops to what bishops do and nobody ever has to worry about whether they should be a soldier or a peasant or a bishop because that's all settled for them in their given tradition and their family and their location in the scheme of things. What are all things then? Well we have a word for it, we just don't notice it, they are all creatures. Creatures created by this supreme being.

And they thought all the things were ordered by how close they were approached to God's nature. They had a notion in the Christian world of what they called 'noble metals'--things like gold and silver. These were noble because the Christians thought they were more like God: they were incorruptible; they would not rust. And so when you looked at gold, you thought that gold is much closer to God than just an ordinary rock. And it was all organized around God as the highest and greatest thing in the universe.

What humans in the modern age were all about was dominance, dominating the world, subjecting it to their will and so if you think about the great heroes of the last several hundred years, they were explorers and conquerers bravely encountering new situations. Scientists who cracked the code and figured out how to manipulate things and use things or cowboys who has this sort of deep inner will and they could go out and break down any obstacles in the path to achieving what they desired.

Everything is interconnected, everything is exchangeable and all meaningful distinctions have been gotten rid of except this one empty distinction, to be efficient and optimized. And you see it all over the place, we're so used to it that we don't even notice it, that's what great philosophers are supposed to do is help us see what's going on in our understanding of being.

You have these sort of frightening sub divisions, that you see as you drive in from the airport usually, where all the houses on the side of the hill are the same shape, the same color. They just discovered that's the most efficient way to build a house and they just build them all that way and everybody manages to live that way and so everything is just totally standardized.

The most efficient way to feed people is to have a few ways of doing it and then you impose it everywhere and the most efficient way to make a broad range of goods available to everybody is to do it on a big scale like Walmart does and make everybody indistinguishable and have everything organized and efficiently laid out.

Its just to get the world as organized as possible and to bring more and more into this total organization, its really systems thinking. Everything is a system, the airplane is no longer an object when its sitting on runway, its a cog in the transportation system. And you might think that well at least you are gonna be there to either take the plane or not take the plane but no, the tourist industry has been set up for it to make you a filler of this potentiality for a running around that is on the runway. And why would be people go just to get a rest and get more energetic so that they can plunge back into the rat race in which they are all replaceable, they're just doing some job efficiently and if somebody comes along and does it more efficiently they can be replaced.

One of the dangers of technology is it relieves of us the burden of having to develop skills. Technology is always sold as a labor saving device, when you buy the latest technology for cooking the promise is you can cook as good as a master without any of the skills the master has, and that goes for everything, with music as well. All of us now today can enjoy music of a quality unimaginable to most people in the history of the world in the comfort of our homes with very little cost and very little effort. That's a great promise, who would give up on that and that pleasure of hearing music in that way but the danger is that we give into the seductions of technology to the degree that we lose all of these skills.

Everything on the internet is equal, you can have the most important information right next door to the most trivial. You can find out what your friends had for breakfast and you can find out also that there were a hundred people killed in Iraq that day. With Google you can find anything, you can go in Wikipedia and get facts about anything and that in a certain way is terrific if you just use it for something relevant but if you think thats just the best thing in the world, just to have more and more information, more and more transformable stuff, more and more applications for your iphone that make it able to do more and more things and that thats just what it is all about. Everything gets leveled, there's no meaningful differences any more between what's important and what's not important, what's trivial and what's crucial, what's relevant and irrelevant, it's all reduced to just more information.

If you wanna really be efficient you don't want this kind of interference, you know "Hey, this is Sunday! or this is Christmas, you have to stop that!" Or "This is the middle of the night what are you doing?" No, twenty four seven is one of the great, great achievements of our civilization. Somethings go on all the time, are available all the time an its very handy. You know, three o'clock in the morning I can rush to my computer and I can google and no on is gonna tell me this page is not available because you are supposed to be sleeping! No they are gonna give to you, so its an absolutely great benefit for myself but you can see what this is doing. What is it doing is making us look at time as something that is infinitely usable and accessible, doesn't matter where it is and I can access. As against being, as it were, forced back in to understanding that there are times that are just different, that are a different quality that are not appropriate to use in this way.

01:59:34:06-02:00:06:12

MARK WRATHALL VO

And its true that it changes us so we have to become the kind of people who are satisfied with the sort of commodities that are delivered to us. You can imagine people who really are connoisseurs of jazz music, who really understand that one of the great things about jazz music is the way musicians are responding to the performance hall and the audience and the particular musicians that are there and the weather and whatever accidents are happening, the jazz musicians are incorporating it into their performance.

Responding to the other musicians is one of the most important things.

Responder a otros músicos es una de las cosas más importantes.

02:00:18:00-02:00:45:00

RYAN CROSS VO

In playing together you'll hear that in the music where the piano plays something, the bass will react and drums are playing and then trumpet will jump in. You're interacting with everything, everything is a part of what you are trying to get to. Anything can change what's happening, the cell phone goes off and then all of a sudden its like 'oh' Cat might make fun of it on the piano or even on the trumpet or whatever it is and it all becomes a part of the performance.

And if you, as a listener, are a skillful listener and have the bodily dispositions to pick up on that you'd never be satisfied by listening to recorded jazz performance on CD because thats not the performance that would be optimal for your bedroom or living room.

I've hear that flamenco artists have a deep aversion to even being recorded for this very reason. They have just an intuitive sense that recording them and making their performance reproducible in all sorts of foreign contexts is distorting what flamenco is really all about.

Yesterday, you asked something "What is the flamenco rhythm?" And I said that the compas, or rhythm was a measurement but I was wrong about that. Instead, the rhythm is a way of walking, a way of speaking, a way of kissing, a way of embracing. That is the rhythm...

We're speaking to a malise that a lot of people feel, but they may feel, well you use malaise but I've no right to because this is progress, this is civilization, this is modernity or this is...we've made this tremendous leap ahead from all those benighted peasants in the middle ages so who am I to complain? This sense of being, this sense of being morally compelled not to protest, which a lot of people have along side the feeling of somethings wrong here but I can't believe the feeling because reason tells me on the contrary. We can explode that myth.

02:03:40:07-02:04:02:10

HUBERT DREYFUS VO

The problem is how to respect technology, appreciate technology, use it to get rid of all the dumb stuff that we used to have to do and yet not let it get rid of what matters, and what is local, and what is unique, and what is significant and meaningful for us.

02:04:05:20-02:05:12:00

IAIN THOMSON VO

If I think nature around me is nothing but meaningless stuff waiting to be optimized then why shouldn't I put a nice big hotel here, make a lot of money and all the people can see the ocean. The idea that there is something there independently of me is something you have to cultivate and develop a sensitivity to. And I think that's what a poet does, the poet is sort of the paradigmatic instance of the person who has learned a receptivity to things independent of us. We can all learn from that, you don't have to be a poet or an artist, you can be a cook or a carpenter or a soccer player. Life is made most meaningful when you respond to meanings that are independent of you. Right? I mean is a point that goes back to Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard said that if you think all meaning comes from you then you can just take it back, you are a king without a castle, you are a sovereign of a land of nothing. There has to be something in the world that pushes back, that has some force over you or else you'll never experience anything as really mattering to you.

Because a machine makes it and a machine doesn't FEEL. The machine doesn't UNDESTAND. Guitars are always alive. The wood LIVES. Let's not even talk about a guitar. Let's talk about a commode, or a dresser or a TABLE. When a TABLE is made by HAND the FOOD off it TASTES DIFFERENT. Or take a plate that's is machine made and compare to eating off a plate made of clay that comes from earth and was touched by human hands. Why? Because there is dedication. The machine is distinct from the human in that precisely by virtue of the fact that a man is not a machine.

The standardization that's required for efficiency rules out those sorts of practices and what characterizes all of them is that they are not terribly efficient, they require a real sensitivity and receptivity to what the particular world requires.

Japanese carpentery doesn't have the focus on efficiency, it's the quality thats really important and the feeling and so some projects , for instance, Hiroshi did this project that took seven years, after he selected the wood it took two years for the wood to dry and then it took 18 months for him to cut everything out in his shop. You have to be patient if you want a Japanese structure.

The way in which Michelangelo saw David in the Marble, there was like the inchoate possibility of David and he brought it out. For me thats what we all have to do in our lives in whatever way, you know? And its a little mysterious to talk about it like that but I think anybody who gets really good at things has some sense for it means to bring out what's there that nobody has seen. For me it was sports when I was younger now it is teaching right? So, and that means interpreting texts, so I get incredible joy out of showing that a text that's been read for 2000 years, there's things there that nobody has even seen, that are really there and that once we articulate them together we can all see that they're really there. That great texts are inexhaustible in the same way that reality itself is inexhaustible I think that's the lesson that there is this kind of mysterious source that continues to offer humanity meaning, you can all it God if you're religious, religious in the literal sense of religia, everything is interconnected.

A focal practice reverses all the bad things we talked about. It draws a group of people together around some specific thing that matters, that requires a kind of skill and mastery in order for it to be done and which brings the people out in their own uniqueness at their best.

I tell my students you can't buy the meaning of life, you can't borrow it, and you can't manufacture it you can only discover it. And then I invite them to search their experiences and their hopes and aspirations for occasions where they are in a position to affirm four propositions. The first is there is no place I'd rather be, the second is there is no one I'd rather be with, the third is there is nothing I'd rather be doing and the fourth is this I will remember well.

02:08:44:01-02:09:08:14

LINDSEY BENNER VO

There are moments when I'm juggling and they are my favorite moments when I just get lost in what I am doing. And what happens to me on stage, I get to share that moment with my audience. I will juggle in a crowded bar and I know it's working when people go silent and everyone stops and everyone looks because they can't help it. And those are magic, those are magic moments and that's why I do it.

With Jazz, you know, you are able to interact with the stars of jazz. Somebody like Winton Marcellus or Branford or Ray Brown, which was my teacher, you can just go up to them and say 'Hey!' Its a community and that community is what really drew me to jazz music. There's those times and you'll get too inside and those jazz masters will be sitting in the audience, those jazz legends will come out and be like "Hey man, connect".

If I would not be back here, how many African-American restaurants you'd see? None...And if I had not stayed here all the time I did, the community would have gone down to nothing, to nothing. You stay in a community and you build it and you make it work. I have to do what I have to do, I had to go to that park this morning and cook these 20 gallons of gumbo before I go and serve it out there and thats a fun thing about today. Look how many people you made happy, just with a little cup of gumbo.

Why is it that there is something so powerful about eating together? We could all just take a quick hamburger and talk, yeah sure, we could. But there is something about eating together about experiencing together the really good taste of this meal, the experience of sipping the wine together. But also it goes deeper than that, humans need to eat to live, so we are in a collective act we are sustaining life our life together.

02:11:55:07-02:11:58:21

TAO RUSPOLI VO

So you were saying good food gives rise to good flamenco?

¿Entonces usted dice que la buena comida da lugar al buen flamenco?

02:12:01:05-02:12:25:15

MANUEL MOLINA VO

Well actually good flamenco comes from NOT having food. But when there IS food, that's reason enough to have flamenco party! That's what we Gypsies have, we don't need a lot of money for a party. We can buy a melon, we can have a party.

Centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dancing music that would go on for hours and hours until dawn, and they were always magnificent because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific. Every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And it was like time would stop and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal. And he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done a thousand nights before, but everything would align and all of the sudden he would longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity, and when this happened back then, people knew it for what it was. They called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant Allah! Allah! Allah! God! God! God! That's God. You know. Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded Southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from Allah! Allah! Allah! to Ole! Ole! Ole! Which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances and in Spain when a performer has done something impossible and magic.

Poet!

When I die I want to die in Triana/ Near the little square so that I can hear the bells/ Like this anyone would want to die

It will depend on the particular people there, it'll depend on the particular kind of music and the particular talent of the master musician and the particular instrument and the particular place and time. All that gets expressed in the music, itself.

And by focusing things I mean they focus different activities, they draw different activities together, different things you could be doing. So again think about making music, the practice of making music depended on all kinds of other human activities and human practices and you have skills for playing violin and you have skills for creating a hall where music could be played, and you have skills for composing music and so on and those all would come together on this moment when the music would be performed.

Focal practices would also gather people and they would bring people together to focus on this one event so the whole community, if they wanted to hear music, would come together and they would be drawn together and they would focus on this moment of great mastery, when someone was again exhibiting this amazing feature of human life that we can become skillful and disclosive and show the world in a way that most people aren't capable of doing.

And this is the way I would like everybody to come to the table sometimes at their houses. Sit your people down to the table if they're going to eat just Ramen noodles. Sit 'em there. And let 'em eat it and enjoy it. And you enjoy talking to one another and enjoy life. You know that.

02:17:08:06-02:18:11:08

HUBERT DREFUS VO

When we finally understand mastery and a responsiveness to the richness and the calling in the world, then we understand that the source of meaning in our lives isn't in us, that's the Cartesian tradition. And it isn't in some supreme being, but it's in our way of being in the world. Being in the world is a unifying phenomenon, when people are at their best and most absorbed in doing a skillful thing they lose themselves into their absorption and the distinction between the master and the world disappears. Seeing what masters can do and seeing we can do it too and everybody can in their way take responsibility and become involved and bring out whats best in themselves and in the world that we can re-experience what people call 'the sacred'.